


Foob Analysis

by orphan_account



Series: The Foobiverse Revisited [12]
Category: For Better or For Worse (Comics)
Genre: Analysis, Essays, Meta, i won’t be posting the comments, irregular posts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:47:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 31
Words: 13,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22233400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Series: The Foobiverse Revisited [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1495973





	1. January 8,2007

  
In the beginning, there was Lynn, who needed an outlet to vent her frustrations about her life a housewife, but her ideas were without form. She then went to a drwaing board and made veiled caricatures of her own family. She the took the caricatures to the Syndicate to bless her work. And yea, verily the Syndicate said it was good. Thus the multitude were forced to watch the progress of StEllie the Vapid who thought she no longer needed the degree her parents shelled out heavy coin for her to get, in order to please ChildManJohn who regarded a wife with a degree and career as a abomination in the eyes of the Lord and only the rubes said it was good. The multitude watched as Michael the GrumblingTrollBoy harrased his hapless young sister and afflicted her with a cruel byname and questioned Lynn's decency as she said it was good. They would as ChildManJohn asked for advice from ExtraPatheticLoserChildMan Ted and tried to live by his failed teachings and questioned Lynn's sanity and declared it good. They watched her mostly failed attempt to lionise Alice the Martyr and demonise Connie the Antilifemonster Careerwoman and questioned if Lynn came from Stepford,Massachusets. They watched as time passed on, and yea verily, so the characters physically aged they mentally varied not from 1979, even as thus Lynn herself did not from 1959. As the years went on, so did her attitudes about the true, good and beautiful did ossify. She thus created the fantasydaughter April, so that we may know that,although they may seem like clear-headed young people who have something useful to give the world, teenagers are Nazi space-monsters who disrespect their elders and use lame slang like "foob" and do not invest their hopes and dreams in phyiscal goods and mind-numbingly bland domesticity. So thus is loutish conformist Michael rewarded for decades of thick-headedness by more success (and a ReactionaryFantasy Doormat Wife) than the self-obsessed lump of meat with eyes deserves while Elizabeth is about to be punished for 'rebellion' by yet more social indignation and romantic misadventures. But, yea, some Higher Power charged with silencing the chronically stupid and criminally square hath struck Lynn with an affliction which will drive her from the drawing board for good. And we, the comic-reading public who value Quality over Quantity say *IT IS GOOD*.


	2. January 9,2007

Alright, I admit it. Yesterday's post was incoherent and possibly blasphemous. However, I am so annoyed by the comic strip For Better or For Worse and its cast of unpalatable clods, I'm willing to invite the Man Upstairs' wrath. It could scarcely be worse than watching these twits screw things up. The reason, of course, is that the Patterson family and their associates, over the last twenty-eight years, present a clear danger to themselves and those around them. The locus of the menace are the Foob vices par excellence: NARCISSISM and OBLIVIOUSNESS. This band of WASPy nitwits present themselves as progressive friends to all the world -- just so long as the world doesn't ask them to sacrifice one of the pea-brained whims they refer to as a worthy ambition or alter any of the puerile stereotypes they mislabel a well-resoned conviction.   
  
How did dingdongs like Mikerobe and Lizaboob launch themselves on an unhappy world with the delusion that they were actually fit to participate in the real world with sane, decent people? Simple: St. Elly of Milborough, patron saint of smug jackasses, told them so. This proves the Japanese adage that children who don't know how to behave come from incompetent parents. I'll get around to the juvenile cipher they call a father in a future post, so leave us examine the defective primary care-giver. If Elly is supposed to represent the ideal mother, Our Humble Artist has unwittingly given us a huge boost in understanding why society seems on the verge of collapse: the woman claims to be infallible. Seriously. Almost two decades of this strip, and not a sign she might actually have ever made anything like a mistake in her life, or that her ideas of the true good and beautiful may not mesh with some hatefully icky, unfair antiGod notion nonFoobs call Objective Reality. Anything wrong in her family's life is obviously the fault of OTHER PEOPLE or the Devil (who inspire OTHERS to conspire against the interests of the Almighty's chosen Foobs.) OTHER PEOPLE are the victims of disaster, misadventure and crime and Pattersons should never suffer from life's hardships. OTHER PEOPLE cajole her to do something silly, like use technology she cannot understand, which of course is a hateful evil because BIG BROTHER might use the Interweb to police her thoughts. OTHER PEOPLE lie, cheat and steal due to a foul wind from beyond the horizon and not because someone is too vain to notice the obvious and let tehm. OTHER PEOPLE corrupt innocent young girls with the base heresy that they can live a full, happy and meaningful life without marrying some spindly and passive/aggressive childman and giving birth to a brood of gender-balanced hellions. (God has obviously struck the doxy for her sins by depriving her the use or her legs, thereby showing us to LISTEN TO MOTHER). OTHER PEOPLE dare impugn her daughter's honor by suggesting she plays with the lives and affections of others with the decency and humanity of a cat killing a mouse. OTHER PEOPLE suggest that her beloved son is the very model of the modern facile dithering dunderhead, instead a misunderstood artist. OTHER PEOPLE have the unreasonable and ludicrous notion that they have any input into a Patterson's wedding or that their hopes and dreams are worthy of fulfillment. OTHER PEOPLE call the ideal son-in-law a clinging, whiny, manipulative, self-absorbed non-entity and the ideal daughter-in-law a reactionary fantasy straight out of Bewitched. OTHER PEOPLE suggest that she wasted her life in suburban purdah bonded to a superannuated cipher looking for a Mommy he can bang, instead of getting the degree for which they shelled out heavy coin(Mommy and Daddy didn't think she could find Prince Charming, so screw 'em). The reason for all this ludicrous prattle is that OTHER PEOPLE (of course) are 'just jealous'. That's right, folks: 'jealous' of a whiny, potato-nosed old simpleton living in the past who's too 'good and noble' to see the writing on the wall (actually her outside wall, which is soon to change from 'J & E Patterson" to 'M & D'). Elly Patterson is the kind of pea-brained, smug narcissist, who long ago having abandoned any pretense of reason or self-awareness, caroms from one self-created crisis to the next with the oblivious smirk of those the Gods have marked for destruction, knowing full well they need do nothing, save watch her brood make a worse botch of things.


	3. January 10,2007

  
In my last post, I promised I'd get around to discussing the other nitwit parent, Manchild John. His contribution to forming his children's personalities is much less than his wife's because he can't seem to open his mouth, even though he knows he should. I say this because most of the time whenever he appears, he seems to clearly identify a problem that Elly can't make herself see, as well as how best to deal with it. Why this inaction all his life, you may ask? Because we see things that the artist is not herself aware of. One of these is that this man has made it his life's work to watch over and sooth a woman mortified by the fact that time passes and, with it, the appropriate way of reacting to the world. After all, he started this strip mired in the same Darren and Samantha worldview as Elly but, unlike her, has slowly learned to budge a little towards the 21st century. Neither does he take as seriously the learned counsel of the esteemed Possum Lodge wannabe, Ted. Nor does he wrap up his identity in a building or material objects as much as Elly (or, for that matter Mike or Liz.) The model trains he adores are simply a harmless affectation. Changing customs and technologies simply do not threaten him the same way because come what may he'll still have a meaningful identity and purpose. Elly's obsession with continuity from past to future stems from her (read, Lynn's) archaic viewpoint that it's the only legitimate way for a woman to project her identity and values into the future. It's axiomatic for people of her time women with hobbies affirm the chain of life between generations whereas career women destroy it. This is why you see idiot smug women lining up behind their worthless arsewipe sons when they screw over their ex-wives on child custody. Dr. Patterson was brought up to believe that you can't take people where they aren't willing to go unless you absolutely HAVE to. This is why he doesn't say things that need saying, such as "Elly, I know you have fond memeories of our home, but it's simply a building and we've outgrown it" and ( This was SUPER-NECESSARY) "Michael, family is family so quit picking on your sister"


	4. January 11,2007

  
Today, I'd like to tell you a story. It's the story of a boy named Michael. Michael had a good home with nice parents and the world was great. Then, one day something TERRIBLE happened. His parents betrayed him in the worst possible way: They *SHUDDER* had another child!! Impossible! Inconceivable! Impermissable! Didn't they know they'd got it right the first time? It must be some sort of cruel mistake. Even though the damage appeared to be done, our hero knew what to do: make the evil interloper so unwelcome, the stork would take her back and HIS family would be saved. However, something was wrong. His parents actually seemed to care for the unwanted little surprise. Frustrated, our unfortunate little wretch was reduced to having to tolerate her presence, while kindly and nobly reminding Lizardbreath that she was not needed. Sadly, his life was afflicted by the presence of other people who DARED insist that they had opinions and dreams that were more important than his own. However, one day after years of tribulation at the hands of those who selfishly wanted to force him to GIVE (which is bad and unFOOBY) instead of take, a spineless, handwringing doormat, tired of the horrific, unnatural burden of indepedence accepted his offer of salvation from an autonomous identity. THE END.  
  
Okay, this is kind of stupid but it highlights Michael's chief function in the strip: to stand around being either sullen or whiny at the prospect of the thing that Lynn Johnston dreads the most: personal sacrifice and discomfort. Elly, of course, representing Lynn's dread of the future (namely, that she might have to deal with change, time and mortality, like everyboy else) and John, the nagging voice that suggests she just might be acting like a jackass. However, someone who insists on WILLFULLY blinding themselves to the fact the world is What It Is instead of What She Wants It To Be, cannot be confined to engaging in hand-wringing, inertia and tantrums


	5. January 12,2007

As we should know by now(and as her real family will gladly tell you), the merry band of meltdown survivors called the Pattersons are only halfway based on the Johnston family. By Johnston's own admission the rest of their hatefully twisted personalities reflect components of the artist's own diseased psyche.

Elly is not so much a stand-in for LJ herself but Lynn expressing her anxiety over the threatening outer world and its ungroovy tendency to expose her to discomfort. The suffering and anxiety of others is always good for a chuckle, however. Witness Mira Sobinski, walking, talking ethnic joke and the cartoon ogre Kelpfroths.  
John is Lynn expressing the forbidden and possibly evil emotions of doubt and introspection. (I mean, why ask questions when you already have the answers?) Michael is a stand-in for her seemingly infinite resentment at the minor inconveniences and disappointments the rest of us simply shrug off. Case in point: most of the plot lines since the early nineteen-nineties have been a transparent attempt on her part to edit events to her liking, simply because SHE doesn't aprove of the script as laid out by an infinitely greater author (Hint: the Artist who created her, you, me and the rest of the freakin' Universe. That's right kiddies, I think Lynnie is trying to blue-pencil GOD!!) I'll get to what her other child represents in my next post, but today I'd like to discuss what part of Lynn Elizabeth is: Elizabeth is Lynn when she's being an arrogant, self-absorbed swine. This hateful tendency eternally ricochets between two, count 'em, two manifestations: Cocksure Ignorance and Victimism. Ever since Nizziepoo could fill out a bra, she's being stringing Milborough menfolk along left, right and centre, all the while mewling about what a poor, misunderstood victim of male selfishness she is. This stems from her (read, Lynn's) belief that other people only exist to cater to her whims and must never subject her to even the least amount of discomfort. Is this moral? No, but the Lizardbreaths of this life haven't got much patience for morality that might subject THEM to inconvenience.

This also explains Johnston's disaffection for organised religion a lot more than the pervert in the vestry with the present in his pants. Even though she doesn't see it that way, her life has been one long exercise in psychically shoving people out of her way, yelling "MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!". The man on the cross, though, he don't play fair. When she was growing up, she read his words and figured out he was sayin' somethin' mean and cruel to her: "No, Lynn. *YOU* move."


	6. January 13,2007

  
Now, we examine the last core member of our merry band of Foobs, April. Although it might seem to an outside observer the she's the most sensible and even-tempered of this dismal dung heap of dysfunctional dunderheads, Lynn spares no effort to reveal the truth (or at least HER truthiness): April is MEANT to depict a dangerous and wrong-thinking young girl motivated by a confusing and alarming psychosis: curiosity. The first victim of this dread urge to learn by exploring instead of being a good little Foob and unreflectively swallowing whole the infantile, imbecilic and obsolete manure-pile of prejudices St. Eleanor the Bland calls the wisdom of the ages is the beloved family dog, Farley. The freaky little demon-spawn actually went down to the gentle little brook (English: raging torrent marked "Avoid at all costs") through an unlatched the gate and fell in. It is not at all the fault of the good little foob Lizardbreath (self-absorbed brats) or vigilant (clueless) parents, after all. She has also been corrupted by another sick, wrong, warped and lunatic concept: The unFooby unconcern with material goods. I mean, everyone knows that one's emotional life and personal identity are meant to revolve around the things one owns and consumes. We have Father with his model train fetish, Mother with her house and belongings, Brother with his super doll from college and his Powerbook, Sister with her crud. April ,however, has clearly gone mental: when she no longer needs an object, she gives it to someone who can use it. In Lynn's mind this means the child is giving away her identity. Her healthy curiosity about the world around her and lack of materialism clearly depict her as the child from Mars. Too bad for Lynn she can't figure out Martians are used to comment on the follies and vices of the writer's contemporaries instead of depicting someone to be feared and abhorred. Then again, what good is curiosity if you already have all the answers anyway?


	7. January 14,2007

The Patterson family aren't the only people in the universe worthy of inclusion into Lynn's charmed circle of the morally perfect. There are those whose values and viewpoints mesh so well with the teachings of Blessed Mother Eleanor that they can safely be called Foobs-in-waiting, destined to provide the long-wanted heirs to the kingdom of Foobery. I refer, of course, to Deanna the Hand-wringer and Anthony the Gray.

Now, at first it may seem that Deanna is a reactionary fantasy straight out of Doris Day movie or a sixties sitcom, but that's only because we're using something called objective reason. If you saw the world the way you were supposed to, like Lynn and her Lynnions do, you'd realize that you and I call a simpering child-woman who stands aroung quietly sniveling and whining while her overgrown ten-year-old husband sticks her with the children while he plays with his friends and witlessly risks his safety for a piece of consumer electronics is magically transformed into the ideal Mother of Tomorrow, thereby earning her just praise and hosannas in the Church of Foob. Especially since in Lynn's eyes it's only 1961 and a bit.

Her understandable, if not exactly excusable, refusal to admit times and manners have changed in her almost sixty years on this planet have worked their Magic on the infamous Granthony. You gotta realize this kind of clingy, manipulative, shallow, dish-water dull plodder *IS* what they called a 'dynamic young go-getter' back when people used that phrase without ironic laughter. The fact that they seem to have to stuck her husband, John, in a mimeograph (photocopiers are new-fangled and BAD) to create the guy only increases his luster in the the eyes of John the Bland and Eleanor the Smug. A lesser place on the pantheon is reserved for Ted the Sacred Non-entity, Moira the Inheritor, Lovely the benign cultural stereotype and Josef, the kindly Bohemian. For their acts of kindness in encouraging the Foobs, steering them away from the siren song of the nonFoob world and confirming the sacred principles of Foobishness, they will be rewarded in the end with peace, prosperity, a rancher in suburbia, a self-cleaning oven and furniture permanently encased in plastic 'for company.' Valiantly do they struggle, for Foobishness is constantly at risk from the evil-doers of this world and their claim 'What's sauce for the Foob is sauce for the gander.'


	8. January 15,2007

A family of such self-perceived nobility and purity as the Pattersons have as a matter of course many enemies who knavishly dare to place obstacles in the way of Foob perfection and happiness. These jealous vermin hatefully conspire to subject our holy family to emotional discomfort and mild inconvenience. Silly, wrong-thinking people! Don't they realize that their destiny is go around wishing they were as good as the Foobs? The most pernicious of these evil ones are those who threaten the romantic happiness of Elizabeth the Pure. They dare complain that she callously and witlessly toys with their affections while expecting them to jettison lesser romances from their hearts. To compound their lies, they claims she will not sacrifice the least convenience for them while making them rearrange their lives on a whim. The first of these scoundrels is Eric the Lustful. His great crime was suggesting to ObliviLiz that since they were sharing lodgings she should go 'roadside' with him, when Lynn's will is for Anthony the Gray to marry a woman unsullied by thought or sexual experience. He then compounded his monstrousness by doing 'it' with someone of less purity and deceving our sainted amoeba-brain. (Pay no heed to the envious and spiteful who call her someone without a broomstick up her ass.) Her virtue and bliss were also under menace by Wing Commander Sleazoid Warren, Howard the Brute and most recently Cst. Wrong of the OPP. It is of little import that others may say the malignant will of the first two would be obvious to a mentally challenged five-year-old since they are corrupted by the dread unFooby heresy of paying attention to their surroundings. The false hero, Paul the ignoble savage, nearly slipped through her (meager) defenses. He scandalously deceived Elizabeth into thinking he would transfer to Toronto to be near her home *right now* instead of the dreary wasteland Spruce Narrows where she *used to be*. He then runs into the arms of HIS high school girlfriend, Susan the Straw woman who had replaced our hero as teacher when she had left the dread pesthole of Mtigiwhatchamacallit to find her destiny(Or as we sane, decent human beings say: reneged on her commitment to decent, trusting villagers on a childish whim). Since the only thing that matters to a Foob beside their own convenience is whatever they currently want, the claims of others that she had deceived herself are wrong on their face, as well as his need for happiness with his locker-room fantasy. This notion that Foobs must never suffer the least obstacle to their will and they too must bend to other wills stems from a deep-seated vanity on the part of the writer and artist. For years, she's been described as an arrogant and stubborn control freak, who counters the truth and facts of others with truthiness and factiness. The sphere in which the noble spirit of truthiness must banish unpleasant facts, with their nasty way of making Lynn look a foolish anachronism, is the sphere that of gender relations. The reason that the interdomestic polecattery the Elizabeth character is subjected to is described in almost loving detail is that most of the romances LJ was part of ended with her being betrayed in some fashion, thus this useful factiness (and not-at-all sweeping, lunatic generalization):  
1) I, Lynn Ridgway, am an average human female  
and 2) Most of my boyfriends cheat on me  
ergo 3)all men cheat given half the chance.  
The first axiom can be safely said to be dubious at best. Most women are not belligerent narcissists who confuse a sullen refusal to enlighten themselves with firmness of character. Number two is also rubbish because slick jackasses like her first husband can use manifestly phony flattery to wrap freaks like her around their fingers without breaking a sweat, especially since crazy girls always jones for massive fuck-ups like that anyway. Number three is the daftest axiom of the lot because the vast army of future good little cits who would sooner hammer their tongues into the ground with a croquet hoop than cheat on their wives are slightly intimidated (scared fartless) by the LJs of this world.


	9. January 16,2007

The next PatterPodPerson to be subjected to the forces of what broken-headed psychotrooper LJ calls injustice is mother's little misunderstood artist, Mikerobe. There are two baleful entities standing in the way of Fooby bliss with his hand-wringing, spinelessly submissive, bovine, dimwitted doormat and all-around full tilt gonzo reactionary fantasy bride Deanna. The first, of course, is her mean-spirited bellowing shrew of a mother. This pushy ethnic seems to have nothing more to do than commit the ultimate sins in Foobland - (a) telling a Patterson what to do *bad* and (b) trying to displace St. Elly *worse*. She dared have the treasonous and unreasonable opinion that a wedding ceremony has something to do with the bride's family and their hopes and dreams, when as everyFoob knows the Patterson clan are the best people on Earth and the only people who matter. She also attempts to 'horn in' on the daily lives of the pitterPattersons, Meredith the Dim and Robin the Septic, by ,I dunno, actually showing up and saying and doing things instead of going off into a corner and quietly dying or something. I mean, since Deedoormat has daily access to the perfection that is Elly, she doesn't her imperfect nonWaspy birth parents any more. 

What motivates the DP (a canadianism short for 'displaced person': it refers to people getting out from behind the Iron Curtain) screwball's cavalcade of kitsch?The meaningless fact that the wedding ceremony she longed for with its celebration of community and validation of her love for her man was replaced with an anonymous ceremony on a pier, as if she were debastarding a child. Why should any Patterson care about the wishes of this goofy foreigner and her frustrated dreams and the inferior vermin she left behind. Let lesser mortals wrongly indulge her sick delusions: the path of Foob clearly indicates she is to be frustrated forever.   
The woman's pain and suffering is used as fodder for the sham progressive's continuing a hateful stereotype (Look at that crazy ethnic lady: she's crazy) as well as the misogynistic brain fart, Mother-in-Law as domineering meat-axe. It's like I said elsewhere: the pain and suffering of Other People is a source of cheap laughs to the manic hateball dreaming up this crap.


	10. January 17,2007

One of the most galling pair of characters to be pulled out of Crazypants Lynn's rectum are Mikerobe and DeeBreeder's downstairs neighbors, the Kelpfroths. The irritating thing about them is not their improbable and unfunny funny last name or their old-fashioned and 'silly' first names Melville and Winnie, a result of WASP dingbat LJ and her inability to contrive a convincing sounding ethnic name. That is only a minor sin, based on misreading back issues of Mad magazine, wherein people are advised to come up with totally improbable names for imaginary characters for authenticity's sake'.(The crazier the name, the more believable) I have no beef with goofy names. When Jim Shooter was coming up with equally strange names for the Legion of SuperHeroes, he was just trying to come with something alien-sounding for Johnny mayo-on-white-bread Fanboy, not deliberately making the names out to be goofy. As for all the wackiness from Japan, you can blame that on unfamiliarity with the foreign and an education system that preaches learning by rote. What gets my guts churning is their portrayal as all that is sick, wrong and unFooby 'cause they DON'T HAVE CHILDREN and, worse yet, AREN'T PARTICULARLY FOND OF THEM. If you've seen enough of this sewage, you know the downstairs people are somewhere in their late fifties or early sixties in age, and in Lynn's version of the true, good and beautiful should at least have one or two children and fussing over their grandkids, like 'normal' people. THAT is the thing that most bugs me about them being used as cardboard trolls. Lynn forgets how easy it used to be to have children because she is haunted by the delusion that safe, cheap and effective methods of birth control can somehow be uninvented. I put it to you that Mel and Winnie at one point shared the hope of having children only to have an unkind fate destroy any such hope. They, doubtlessly, endured the scorn of family and (former) friends for not being able to successfully reproduce, since in the cruel days Lynn wants to return, barrenness was seen as a moral judgment. This sort of mental agony and heartache deforms the soul as time wears on, so in order to stay sane they hardened their hearts against children. That sort of fact don't mesh with Lynn's storehouse of factiness, though, so they deserve to be disfigured in a fire, lest they convince DeeDoormat that a childless life might be desirable and not lead to heartache, after all. A double result for Lynn, 'cause her Ozzie-and-Harriet-on-Meth worldview is 'confirmed' and OTHER PEOPLE are mocked. Jesus,she probably watched 'Seinfeld' without not noticing the gang doing anything wrong.


	11. January 18,2007

  
If you've been been paying attention to this mess as long as I have, you'll have figured out Lynn has a strong attraction towards the traditional gender roles of her youth: Man the provider and Woman the nurturer. Things were 'simpler' back then wherein woman attended college in order to find a mate who'd with a degree at the end of his name(her 'degree' entailing the change of surname to match his and the prefix "Mrs."). [The seemingly anomalous support for (male) homosexuals is both a family thing and her relief at finding a male friend who won't go out with other women behind her back.] This stems from her identification with its expression by her beloved father, the one source of comfort in her turbulent early years. THIS is actually comprehensible and almost normal. The expression of her core value in her strip, women plus jobs equals chaos and heartache, is however neither. She tried to prove this factiness in the early years by inserting cynical, smug Connie to try and mock Elly's stay-at-home ways and hold her out as a source of pity. This sort of failed because back then Lynn's mind was still open to different ideas and values, plus also it was kinda hard to make a pediatric nurse into a baddie. This looney-tune expression of a by-gone and best forgotten way of life is the utter chaos work outside the home causes in the life of Foob womanhood. We've already seen the mess that Lynn thinks ObliviLiz's teaching career has made of her life. However, rescue (by which LJ means a suburban box, a eunuchy husband and an annoying kid) is on the way at the (clammy) hands of 'dynamic young go-getter' Anthony 'Pornstachio' Caine. The confusing and hostile world of work threatens the other Foob women also, and thus Foob menfolk. Dedimwit's job as a pharmacist and her 'mix-up' with (the dreaded) birth-control has also caused wacky crap to happen in Misunderstood Artiste Mikerobe's home. In the priggish maniac's contorted psyche, her reactionary fantasy daughter-in-law had seen the light and deliberately taken her 'rightful' place in Foob society - a placid matron in a flaccid suburb, cooing about rug-monkeys. St. Elly herself has been tempted by the fearsome and ominous modern world by (<*GASP*>) becoming a store owner. She 'came to her senses' when confronted with the actions of a loutish, vicious petty thief named Kortney Krelbutz. The heartbreaking thing to befuddled goof Elly's mind is that the young woman betrayed the trust she had given her. The 'right' conclusion is not that an old drab witlessly made constant alibis for guttertrash who would have distinct difficulty deceiving Shaggy and Scooby Doo. Not in Lynn's strip it ain't. The right conclusion is that the 'false' values of feminism have corrupted an innocent. Hopefully her bad example and the mental effort it would take for April to follow her 'daydream' of becoming a vet will scare her into the arms of Gerald (another bland twit, thus Foob-approved). If that don't do it, she can always haul out the big guns and invoke the image of movie-monster Therese. In Lynnie's little world, a woman like Therese CAN'T have looked inside herself and found that she couldn't possibly cope with marriage or motherhood and thus shouldn't try. She isn't sparing herself or the man and child or children involved in an inevitable disaster misery, at all. Doesn't matter if she's ready for either. It's her moral duty to get into ANY marriage no matter how bad and have as many kids as she can no matter the emotional or physical cost to herself or the little tikes involved. And work, education, mental effort - they can't possibly be enjoyable: why, she's pissing away her feminity. This makes what most nonFoobs see as a slightly unsympathetic but forgivable person (esp. since she had to endure passive/aggressive freak Granthony's sickening mewling) into what crazy woman Lynn obviously sees as a monster.   
All this crap is inevitable when you consider the artist's history. Her mother was an abusive lush who turned our hero into an angry, rebellious child with a manic drive for comfort and soothing, programmed like a computer to seek out things and people who made her fell good about herself. Why else this blind belief in a value system that so obviously failed her at every turning and her fixation on men who would exploit her? Her damaged mind obviously thinks that her own horrifying past is the way of the world and the beliefs her father seemed to have would actually work if she'd done it right. More's the pity, since he seemed open to the horrifying (thus useful) emotion of doubt.


	12. January 19,2007

It might seem at first glance that Elly's dad would be the revered patriarch of the Land of Foob and keeper of all its wisdom. This, however, is not the case. He is regarded as a sweet but misguided old man, filling April's head with silly notions. I mean, in LJ's eyes he was probably one step away from senility before his recent stroke robbed him of his voice. Why else he spout such loony fantasies as a fulfilling life without accumulating junk or crapping out children with doormat. Those were the noble and good principles he raised Elly with. Fortunately, the Foob god has robbed him of his voice, and with it the power to mislead the youth with his facts, just as it struck down Lizardbreath the Ever-Virginal's would-be mentor Miss Edwards for her unFoobiness. It also puts paid for his hateful lack of faith in Holy Mother Eleanor herself. He knavishly paid for a college education with the incomprehensible belief that she would get a DEGREE instead of a husband!! That way lies the defeminizing horror of the working world. Fortunately, he has the lesser consolation of care by Iris the Well-intentioned Diingbat. 

This attempt of hers to edit history by having her late father's fictional equivalent hang around addresses two main issues. The first problem with having your elderly father around is that he may have begun to doubt the values he raised you with, which is especially horrifying to Damaged-Goods Lynn. The Depression era worship of material possessions and traditional values is all this tragicomic figure has to cling to, especially since when Drunk-ass Mommy was lighting into her, she threatened Lynnie that she'd have neither. (Racist threats of having to 'settle' for her 'inferiors' probably also explain her dread of the Other, also.) She's stayed put ideologically to prove to Mater and Pater she is a good little girl despite everything. As time passed on, a lot of people of his era might have re-evaluated their position based on new evidence. The second is that he could establish himself (and had so done) as a competing authority in the household. He might go so far as to say 'Elly, you're my daughter and I love you, but let's face it: you're full of crap about this Rebecca girl. In fact, you're full of it about a lot of people.'


	13. January 20,2007

It's well established in Lynn's mind that certain characters are meant to be bad examples. However, this tends to come a cropper since their moral failings of most of them aren't obvious to us, the reading public. I can accept the nastiness of bullying sneak-thief Kortney, brutish Howard and Candace's sexual predator stepfather, while holding my tongue on Lynn's preferred method of dealing with the problem. You can't keep this sort of nastiness 'in the family' nowadays, thank you very much, ma'am. The reason they stopped doing that and going to the cops is 'coz it didn't effing work. The problem is that she seems to see certain sorts of normal, everyday people as a dangerous menace to the social order, by which she means St. Elly the Smug's bogus authority. I've already discussed Mikerobe's 'interfering meataxe' mother-in-law, who's busily being upbraided for doing the sort of thing that would be praiseworthy if done by the Foob matriarch. In the real world, she'd be a rather sympathetic figure, ill-used by an ungrateful daughter and her jackass son-in-law. In fact most of the people she sets up as villains are cartoon ogres who'd be objects of either sympathy or admiration in the real world. This includes 'bad girl' Rebecca. What has she done to earn the imbecile scorn and petty calumny (e.g. going 'roadside') heaped on her by the conflicted hate-tank in charge? Simple as pie, the girl reacts like a human being to the world around her. Does she mouth hollow platitudes about 'the differently abled' like our charmed circle of sham progressives? Nope, she reacts honestly. Does she stand around with a blindly optimistic smirk in the face of impending familial doom? Heck no, sailor: she acts on her frustration. Does she agree to stay in the hokey-ass garage band approved of by Kitschmeister Lynn? Again, no, she signs a record deal to get as far away from suburbia as she can. THIS is her great crime, for which she must be punished by the Halloween concert. She actually wants to move away from Mommie's love.


	14. January 21,2007

  
There are also people racing around the happy land of Foobdom whom Lynn sees as good influences. Their function is to give the character they're associated with 'good' advice. Whether you'd follow this advice in the real world, however is open to question. The prototype for these 'helpful' people is John's college pal and cautionary example Ted McCaulay. This worthy's philosophy is a fourth-hand distillation of that repugnant old goat, Hugh Hefner. The walking punchline is so vain and silly as to stagger the mind. Lynn thinks it mildly humorous that the peewee playboy bunks with his mother, when outside the charmed land of Foobonia he'd be mocked as the puke-inducing loser he is. Luckily for him and us, John takes this hamster's dubious ideas with a salt lick. If only his son were as sharp. He wouldn't be stuck with cartoon bohemian Josef "Weed" Weeder. In the hateful and unnecessary running battle with his 'domineering monster' of a mother-in-law, Weed can always be counted on to warn Mikey to do the Fooby thing and not let her 'have hand' instead of the decent, sane thing and buy peace with the poor woman. He and heroic ethnic joke Lovey Saltzman also gave Prince Jackass of Foobonia super-good and noble counsel in the war with their cardboard troll downstairs neighbors that wouldn't ever pointlessly antagonize normal people and lead to a needless mess. Speaking of 'needless messes', Lynn probably ascribes the chaos that is her middle child's love life to her acceptance of the dubious suggestions of her teacher, Miss Edwards, with its scary concept of independence, especially independence from Elly. I mean, come on, her 'independence' put her in a wheelchair, dammit, not some drunk. Mr Glug-glug, Vroom-vroom, Thump-thump was obviously doing the work of the Foob god. Leave it to Lynn to make physical disability a moral judgment. She contrasts the wrong-thinking healthy active woman forced into dependence with the noble Shannon who will be hanging around Mommy for good. All Lizardbreath needs is a good man to 'save' her, by which she means a mind-numbingly dull existence with the appalling drone, Anthony.  
You'll notice I didn't mention Anthony's boss, working-class hero and childhood buddy of Mikerobe, Gordon. He's now more or less part of John's world and therefore as close to living a reality-based life as anyone in Foobonia can.  
The good advice these junior-grade Foobs give can be boiled down to two principles:  
  
1) Stay the course - You're doing super!  
  
and  
  
2) There's no place like (the Patterson) home.  
  
This sort of puzzles me, because I certainly wouldn't wanna live next to them.


	15. January 22,2007

  
Today, I'd like to play let's pretend and say that you lived in the bedroom community of Milborough. What's more, say that you had to describe the Patterson family to a complete stranger. First, you've got the primary source of income and late-sixties holdover, John. If you asked him about himself, HE'd probably say that he's on the fast road to now-town (thereby showing his obsolescence) and that he's the rock of his family (yeah, an anchor holding them in place). You'd probably hesitate to flat out insult the guy, but you'd give an accurate portrait of a well-meaning but weak child-man busy playing with his toys instead of trying to fix the catastrophe that is his home life. Next, the cause of all the havoc in his fortress of Foobitude: Elly! She means well enough, of course, and doesn't want to live the screwed-up life she does but her neurotic refusal to see the world as it is and people for who and what they are and her ludicrous vanity betray her at every turn. One symptom of her madness is her dread of technological change. Whenever a new device impinges on her awareness she can be counted on to find at least a dozen ways to fear it. When actually persuaded to use the thing, her imbecile refusal to ask for assistance and look stupid cause a ridiculous fubar, leading to her insistence the thing was invented specifically to embarrass her, there proving her idiocy. She also has a funhouse mirror view of the people around her, which would be laughable were it not pathetic and had she not passed it down to her oldest two children. She and Mikerobe both think he's sort of genius, but let's face it; I could eat a few gallons of alphabet soup and crap out better work than him, his masterwork in the making is a waste of time and (if you recall the puff piece he didn't write but should have) he owes his current position to corporate gamesmanship. Not only that, he'd probably crash at Foob central even if John didn't hint he'd own the joint in a few months time. As for the decent, stand-up guy and great dad he and Elly think he is, the less said the better. The laptop stunt has put paid to that illusion everywhere but Foobville. Lizardbreath's lack of street smarts is even more crippling than Mike's, and has caused much greater suffering, because it's joined with Elly's tendency to waffle. At least when Mike puts his foot in it, he's decisive. They also have in spades the parental love of material goods. As I've said before, these guys feel incomplete without some physical object as an object of affection. If the love object threatened or damaged, these people fall apart. Elly's ego-identification with her current address is an extreme form of the disease but then she is larger than life. Well, at least her rump is, anyway. Their sham-progressive politics also deny them any shot at neighbor of the year. They cry crocodile tears over the 'disadvantaged' but they're really only for any change that wouldn't inconvenience them.


	16. January 23,2007

  
I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but I can't help but notice the Patterson family in general and Elly in particular have a deep-seated dread of the new and different. This stems from a near-manic drive to go through this existence without really experiencing anything. Elly's ideal is for a nice, safe, tidy little world where each day is exactly like the one before and there are no nasty little surprises to upset the perfect routine. The notion of being dragged along into things and dealing with the big, nasty world and *gasp* growing as a person fills her with as much horror as her plastic, super-sanitary zombified life fills us. You'd almost feel sorry for her because she's both an unbearable know-it-all and hapless down-the-river patsy. The temptation immediately vanishes because she thinks this horrifying and crippling character defect a mark of singular virtue. The freakish old biddy refers to her smug refusal to budge from a idea whose failure is obvious even to the dullards and toadies she calls her immediate family 'integrity' when it's a sad comment of the rottenness inside her soul. She thereby defends herself by projecting her deformed prejudices on the outside, seeking only those facts that confirm her delusions. Thus the horrid failure of Granthony and Straw-woman Therese's marriage and the chaos between Lizardbreath and the sap Paul stem from a culture clash, breezily ignoring the failed real-world union of White(Lynn) and Bread(Husband no. 1). Another shameless example of begging the question is her pointless animosity towards Lizardbreath's cat, Shiimsaa. The hapless creature is bad because cats are bad, case closed, end of discussion. Part and parcel with her worship of mind-numbing predictability is the worship of material goods. She and most of her family obsess constantly over the state of their beloved material possessions, even valuing them over the well-being of the people and companion animals in their care. Threaten a Patterson with physical harm, as Kortney did with April, and that's no big deal. Threaten or break their crud and you've got a fight on your hands, buddy. One is reminded of South Sea islanders who have formulated a folk religion based on manufactured items, the famous 'cargo cults'. They believe a messiah will someday appear and deliver their rightful cargo from the hands of the white man. Explaining to them about factories and even showing them around one is useless because their faith is pure and will not be sullied by the lies of the Europeans. So it is with the primitive tribe called the Foobs. As long as their cargo stays exactly where it is, the world is safe and the Sun will not die. At least, that's how Elly sees it. The others are probably just good little consumers happily rubbing other peoples nose in their crap. April is thought of as a freak because she doesn't sink her self worth into her possessions.


	17. January 24,2007

  
Over the last twenty-seven years, the Patterson family's sick desire to live a life free of discomfort and worship of inertia have been constantly frustrated. Their reaction is almost always one of complete shock, followed by a variation of the theme, "How did THIS happen?" The reason these schmucks are constantly blindsided is their criminal refusal to pay attention to their surroundings. To one degree or another, their idiot vanity and pride betray them by lulling them into a false sense of security. They compound their idiocy by smugly disregarding anyone who tells them to take anything like a precaution. These people don't really want to do anything that would take any sort of physical, mental or moral effort. That would suggest that they, the blessed Foobs, were as mere mortal men, bound by the laws of fate and chance. So, when the imbeciles get their fingers burned yet again, they scream about how unfair it is that something like taht should happen. They never learn, because they refuse to acknowledge any sort of responsibility. That would be too much like hard work, when it's so much easier to blame a fall guy. Or better yet, they can scream at the schlemiel who 'caused' this by suggesting the possibility in the first place.


	18. January 25,2007

  
There is another sad side-effect of interacting with the Patterson family. Their lack of awareness leads them to do dangerously immoral and reckless things. As an example, Elizabeth's abandonment of the people of Mtigawaki. Granted, her assault has pretty much messed her up for keeps, but she can't be totally absolved. The effect was to turn her back into the clingy little teenager she used to be. Worse, she's trying to re-create her high-school romance with her boy-toy Anthony. The fact that she almost deserves the spineless little creep only softens the blow. She made a commitment to these people and she just blew them off for an incomprehensible reason. Would you wanna try to explain her chasing after a divorcee who came onto her at his own damned wedding or, worse yet, after nearly being violated? Would you feel anything but outrage at the mention of this person? She just doesn't understand how assy her actions are. As for Mikerobe, he's not the likable, solid family man he makes himself out to be. A responsible father wouldn't risk his life to save some grade Z historical novel. A decent human being wouldn't moan at the injustice of his life with his creepy college buddies while expecting his wife to smile, smile, smile for the kiddies. He ain't learned jack shit from the accident that brought his wife back into his life in the first place. His attempt to be moral by turning a harmless puff piece into jitney muck-racking damned near torpedoed his career, thus being immoral after all. He was only able to return via a deus ex machina. Fortunately, middle managers like him get along just fine without morals. The most galling thing about this shallow jerk is his nauseating steamrolling of his in-laws. Other people would take Mira Sobinski's over-eagerness with a rueful shrug and thank their lucky stars they have such a well-intentioned, albeit slightly bumbling, lady in their corner. Not Mikerobe. He bleats pathetically about her 'running his life'. Deanna, although not blameless either, is slightly less repellent. After all, she envied all the kids with WASP parents growing up and now she's got one: Elly. This brings us to the heart of the issue: the cock-eyed moral code this nitwit gave these two jerks. I leave April out of this because she's raising herself, more or less. (And doing a bang-up job, I might add,) Simple as paper, whenever I think of St. Elly, I picture her bellowing at the least source of discomfort. The children thus pick up the notion that the world rotates around them and everyone else exist only to serve their needs. Another lovely thing she and her lap-dog hubby do is destroy friendships and relationships that might lead them away from the Patterson compound and into the scary real world. After all, THEY only exist to do homage to Mom


	19. January 26,2007

We now return to prying open the skull of Eleanor Patterson and examining the contents. As you know, she spends a lot of time bellowing at things she doesn't like. She does this because it usually pays off, thereby confirming her rightness in her eyes. A man from Mars, or teenaged girl as the case may be, would see this victory not a the triumph of right over wrong but people giving in on a non-issue to shut the loudmouthed witch the hell up. She doesn't always get her own way, however. Take for instance the time Elizabeth expressed a desire to drive the motorcycle their friend Gordon offered her. Elly was horrified beyond belief and spent days ranting about how unsafe they were as well as engaging in some hateful arm-twisting to force Liz to obey her dimwitted whim. It took her days to calm down and begrudgingly permit a grown woman to do something legal and safe she didn't happen to approve of. You and I see her actions as petty, narrow-minded and stupid, but not Elly. She's 'protecting her children' and 'setting boundaries', you see. This is all in reaction to a constant source of annoyance to our Foob matriarch: the annoying habit time has of passing and changing things. If it were up to her, she'd be the young mother of two little children we saw twenty-seven years ago, but without the irritating back-chat from said yard-apes. Then she wouldn't have the aching feeling no-one needs her around any longer. She has a dread of biological and social irrelevance her children lack. Admitting this reasonable fear is anathema to someone raised to boost instead of knock, however. It's therefore mutated into low-level hostility at the scary outside world and the hunger to validate the imbecile shibboleths she calls reasonable opinions. She doesn't want friends as you and I understand the term but a gang of yes-men who repeat only that which she wants to hear, which is what she calls 'listening to her' and 'accepting her wisdom'. Real friends tell you what you NEED to hear instead of what you WANT, so they're too much of a bother. I mean, in her mind, contradiction is a one-way street. She also sabotages romances to keep her children dependent, as witnessed by packing Mike off to the farm to wean him away from Martha and the Constable Wright affair. Sure, she may curse him in front of her victim-daughters eyes, but praise him as a god-send in the recesses of her Foob heart. After all, a horrifying mess like that will drive her into the arms of 'dynamic go-getter' (and not 'pliable invertebrate') Anthony, and save her from horrible, horrible freedom. Another symptom of this horror of change is the need to curse inanimate objects fro 'disobedience'. She approached the advent of the information age with something approaching sheer terror. After all, the blasted things might make her look stupid and that would never do. She refuses to learn anything about electronic devices, fails to do so properly and smiles blissfully when they break down because it confirms her belief in their essential uselessness. In her eyes, her mental victory dance is far more important than any boring old moral code dead white guys cooked up. Her definition of goodness, truth and beauty is what makes her feel good about herself. She hasn't felt really good in a long time because of one particular technology which knocked all her comfortable little beliefs into a cocked hat. I'm talking, of course, about the Pill.


	20. January 27,2007

  
The author has made no real secret of her ideal life. This, of course, is Man 'rescuing' Woman from the twin horrors of post-secondary education and the labor force. Having guided her to safety from unnecessary and defeminizing involvement in the male sphere, our protagonists morph into Daddy the breadwinner and Mommy the nurturer, minding her place and raising the kids with a minimum of fuss. Granted, Mom can have a part-time job from time to time in emergencies, but only as a last resort. If Mommy should somehow have spare time, she should rather take up a hobby like knitting, which will see her in good stead (and keep her home) when Junior and Sis are of marriageable age. Old fashioned, you say. Well, most of Lynn Johnston's ideals stem from an era when pregnancy was the near-inevitable consequence of sex. She pines for the days when Elly could talk like Mary Worth and at least look like she had some sense. Of course the ignorant blowhard Mary didn't realize that when they were calling her a smart cookie, they were actually praising her readiness to bow to the inevitable. Growing up, Lynnie never quite saw the rueful half-smiles that suggested some people wished that the inevitable wasn't. Then, the birth-control pill came into common use and everything changed. Like a lot of people, Lynn was horrified. After all, in a stroke the jabbering loudmouth's claim to moral authority and wisdom vanished. Things got even worse. Not only couldn't she undo the damage to the moral fabric of the nation, the nation actually saw it as a blessing. Deep down inside her mind, fueling the constant hunger for vindication, is the desire to be coddled and told she's good. She reacts negatively to any sort of disruption or change, as if it were specifically designed to humiliate her. She responds to the frustration of her desires by railing about the unfairness of it all and, better yet, trying to wish it away. Luckily for her, she has a means by which she can rearrange the past to a more pleasing outcome.


	21. January 28,2007

  
The problem, as Lynn sees it, that her life isn't going the way it's supposed to. Her obsession with marrying off her fictional offspring with people they knew as children comes from a Hollywood cliché with little basis in reality. Her life plan was simple. Step one: marry Prince Charming. Step two: since Hubby is the breadwinner, do freelance artwork as a sort of hobby. Step three: the whole June Cleaver act with the cleaning of the house and cooking of the food and raising of the children. Sadly, it didn't work out that way at all. Her high-school sweetheart turned out not to be Prince Charming, like she'd hoped, but the Black Knight. If that betrayal of trust wasn't humiliating enough, being regarded as a joke by his girlfriends was even worse. After he bailed, she was forced into single motherhood with a child she just couldn't cope with. Being too proud and scared to ask for help, things were looking pretty bad for the lady. Fortunately for her, Rod Johnston, flying dentist and all-round stand-up guy, entered the picture. He gave the lady a home and her boy a dad because that's what decent men do. Happy ending, right? WRONG!!! Lynn Johnston has a deep store of resentment just behind that silly grin of hers. What she resents most is te fact that her children have grown away from her to live their own lives. She resorts to creating a false history wherein her children live 'properly', and coincidentally give Mom her props. The galling thing is that people identify the real people with their fictional analogues. I don't really know but I'm pretty sure that her son Aaron might not be exactly thrilled by his being compared to Mike Patterson. For instance, his real life relationship with his half-sister Kate and all the thorny issues resulting from step-siblinghood were played for laughs. You and I might see that as the reason his relationship to his mother may be described as distant. Does Kate Johnton see herself as Elizabeth, the idiot drama queen who needs to be manipulated into marrying a real-life version of gloomy toad Anthony? Probably not. Does Rod Johnston see John No-Balls Patterson staring back at him from the shaving mirror? Not so much. If reading about fun-house mirror versions of themselves and her Martian Princess imaginary daughter wasn't bad enough, the Johnston family smile forced smiles about her resurrection of the dead. The first case, of course, involve her parents. She had their characters in the strip years after their real deaths, so she could change them into the parents she wanted. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt on that one, because her real mother was an abusive drunk and she should at least have fictional closure. As for Grandpa Jim, up until recently, she was grateful to have a voice in her noggin warning her to pay attention to things.


	22. January 29,2007

The problem with the Patterson family stems from it being centered on a stubborn woman who prefers an unrealistic fantasy of domestic bliss to the messy and disappointing real world. She stumbles through life, expecting things and people to conform to her blinkered vision of society. Since people and things are what they are and not what she hopes they'd be, she sets herself up time and again for an easily preventable disaster. Since she won't admit her original assumptions were wrong, she adopts an unwarranted posture of blamelessness, thereby avoiding personal responsibilty for the chaos that surrounds her. Simple as paper, she's acting like a small child bellowing 'It's not my fault.' The frustrated mess also has the irritating need to be the center of attention. This leads her to stand about railing about the injustice of things when her screw-ball delusions go boom. Does she then want to have the problems in her life go away? No sir, she does not. If the complications in her day-to-day life were to vanish, she feels deep down that she'd have no reason to exist. This is why she'd rather make a botch of her life and act like an ugly, snarling fool than live simply and quietly. Just like her creator, Elly will endure any sort of discomfort simply to be noticed. Since both creator and avatar think their sad mental dysfunction is healthy and normal, they assume everybody else seeks out pain and humiliation to feel special.


	23. January 30,2007

  
Along with being animated by unresolved issues about her childhood, Lynn seems to be fixated on another dread: being ignored. This stems from her need for control of her surroundings. This clashes horrifically with her cherished Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy world. Now, the traditional viewpoint is that, while Father has a role to play in society well into his eighties, as the years wear on Mother should gradually become a sweet old gumdrop who manifests herself socially as an absence. That belief is the necessary result of a fact that Lynn begrudgingly acknoweldges: up till about eighty years ago, most married women folded up and died in their late forties or early fiftes out of sheer hard work. However, man's customs and beliefs didn't catch up with modern medicine until the late nineteen-seventies. The upshot of this, of course, is that unlike most of her peers, Lynn thinks of people her own age as doddering old wrecks who've lived out their usefulness to society and whose only major remaining decision is 'casket' or 'urn'. Inside, of course, she still feels like the vital person she shouldn't be. The disconnect between belief and reality comes through in the strip in the person of her avatar, Elly. Her distaste for change is predicated on the worry that people will stop taking her seriously. This, of course, produces a figure of black comedy: a petty tyrant constantly bellowing that no-one listens to her, never realizing that they've learned to tune her out.


	24. February 2,2007

It occurs to me that the predominant theme in the strip is that of failure. I'm not talking about financial failure, however. All of the Foobs are guaranteed to end up farting through silk at the strip's conversion into the zombie Lynn intends. Most of the characters are to some extent failures on the more important personal level.

  * Elly herself is a befuddled, stubborn and hostile old fool living in the past. She rages impotently at non-issues and interprets the quiescence of her victims as a moral victory. She's raised two clingy dependent children and programmed them with her own fearful lack of curiosity, as well as reducing her husband into a lobotomized slave and ignoring the pressing needs of her third child in order to 'save' the older two from the unimaginable horror of personal growth.
  * John is a facile non-entity who has failed to make any real connection with his offspring, tolerating his daughters only so long as they fawn over him. Instead of addressing the needs of his family he plays futile games with toy trains.
Michael is an insufferable snot, puffing himself up in a delusion of adequacy. The dreary, wooden no-talent is an incompetent husband and emotionally distant father, content to live in near-squalor because of his smug and hapless inability to handle money responsibly. 
  * Elizabeth is a failure in every aspect of her life; an inept teacher content to surrender her authority to her students and vapid self-absorbed twit who bounces from one self-induced calamity to the next, all the while crying 'It's not MY fault.' The only thing she was ever good at was the dubious accomplishment of 'cocktease.'
  * April, although more than competent, has failed to find a real place in the household. Her refreshing curiosty about her world and lack of materialism leave her sadly out of place in this collection of nitwit pack-rats. Also, her reasonable objections to being treated like an afterthought or interloper in her own home are condemned as churlish defiance.
  * Deanna, although deeply concerned about the direction her life has taken, only makes the meekest objection to Michael's rat-fucking idiocy. This is, of course, because of her reasonable fear that anything stronger would cause Elly to strong-arm pliant drone Mike into divorcing her and jealously barring her from her children's lives.
  * Anthony Caine is an even bigger failure than Elly, Mike or Liz. He made an ugly farce of his wedding day, complete with lying his ass off in front of God and everyone. Based on his blatant drooling over Elizabeth, it's obvious the sincerity of his 'forsaking all others' was at least dubious. His marriage was another sordid horror, with his victim-wife steam-rolled into the motherhood she knew herself incapable of. Faced with his constant whinging and emotional unfaithfulness, she entered into an extra-marital affair and left the turd with the child he moaned and wailed into life. He's a clingy, stodgy, morose toad forever pining for his high-school sweetheart.
  * As for the <strike>sitting duck</strike> anti-life shrew Therese, since she now has the life she wanted, she's a success.

  
I, of course, exclude the secondary characters Lawrence and Gordon. Male homosexuals and deferential members of the working class do not threaten Lynn's psyche and thus may be portrayed honestly.

A deeper failure is arrogant blowhard Lynn Johnston's belief that this sad collection of misfits is somehow heroic and noble or, at least, worthy of respect. Even if you allow them the choice to live how they want with the values they hold dear, as is their right as human beings, you have to admit one thing: You can't polish a turd. The fact that she can't see what wrong with these freaks means, not only is she rattle-snake mean, she's either crazy, stupid or both.


	25. February 5,2007

Let's take a good gander at the idiot behind the drawing board. She, by her own admission, had to overcome many obstacles but finally achieved some measure of success. You'd think she'd be happy with her life as it is but based on her need to rewrite history, she's not. There must be some REASON why she needs this thing as an outlet for her frustrations. You'd think by comparing her real life to the desired reality in FBoFW she sees herself as a failure. Granted, her first marriage was, to put it kindly, a disaster. She's married her high-school sweetheart, but instead of living happily ever after like in the movies, her marriage collapsed and she found herself a single mother forced to WORK to support herself and her son. THAT wasn't supposed to happen. It was supposed to be 'Stand by you man' and all that, with Mom chained to the kitchen. She also wasn't the most attentive or caring mother in the world, either. The poor woman believed in the myth of the maternal instinct and was caught flat-footed by her incapacity to deal with the boy. She was forced to seek out help from a kindly outsider, thereby scandalously airing her dirty linen in public. Even though she found herself in a reasonably content second marriage with a child she could actually cope with, she STILL wasn't happy. The sticking point there was the fact that what she thought of as a simple hobby, namely FBoFW, blossomed onto a career. She was actually bringing in a little more money than her husband and frankly was a lot better known. Her two children were and are a source of discontent. They, instead of the constant presences in her daily life she clearly desires, are forthrightly independent, living their lives on their own terms. They'd only seek out her assistance in the most dire of emergencies, and even then with great reluctance. You and I would look on her many positive accomplishments (fame, money, raising two reasonably solid citizens) as a source of pride, not shame.


	26. February 6,2007

An important part of understanding the creator of this mess is to look at her real children and compare them to their fictional versions. Her real children are more enthusiastic in telling people these goons are simply aspects of Mommy's personality than she is and you can see why. We have Aaron, who currently lives in Vancouver where he works in the television industry. I don't really know about his domestic arrangements because he has the common decency to keep his private life private, but whatever his marital status, he probably wouldn't seriously consider marrying someone he met in grade school. He's learned from his mother's mistakes, as has his sister Kate, a single (as far as I know) ski instructor also living in B.C. She most likely doesn't find the idea of hooking up with her high school boyfriend especially romantic or sensible. When and if they marry, they would most likely do so on their own terms while keeping their parents at arms length, like normal people should. As for a desire to inherit the family home, you can forget it. They ain't the Cartwrights and Lynn's pad ain't the Ponderosa. Granted, they may pass by the Johnston house in, say, twenty or so years from now and ask the new owners if they could maybe take a look around but that'd be it. We got two normal, productive average members of society who know their Mom sees as something of an embarrassment. Why else would she transform them from guys you'd drink beer with to the loathsome nitwits we see in the strip. It's gotta be something of a trial for these two schmucks to spend each and every day witnessing their mother's belief that the implausibly cliché lifestyle that Mikerobe and Lizardbreath have is BETTER and more desirable than the one they've created for themselves. Would you want anyone thinking you had ANY link to these freaks? She, no doubt, believes they can't be living their lives PROPERLY because it's OBVIOUSLY taking them in the wrong direction; away from her.


	27. February 9,2007

  
A trend in the strip that helps us understand Lynn's thinking is the phrase 'Stick to your own kind.' Now, we've all noticed her making lip service to the notion of racial equality over the years, sounding like Colbert talking about his 'insert ethnicity here' friend, X. When she first introduced the Enjo family into the strip, Elly was worried that Mikerobe might start spouting racial slurs only to be relieved when he merely pointed out Brian and Dawn were of an age with him and Lizardbreath. At first blush, she **seemed**to be relieved that she hadn't raised a bigot. Ah, but appearances deceive do they not. An examination of its treatment of minorities suggest that Elly and Lynn are distaff versions of the unlamented wash-up, Michael Richards. Deep down, they probably think Hitler was simply misunderstood but feign understanding to survive. If she ever blurts out a racial epithet, her regret will be that _she got caught._ The first time I noticed this was the alacrity with which she packed Elizabeth off to the farm. The reason she gave the world was that she was getting far too chummy with Dawn. Granted, she acted like it didn't matter that the girl was Japanese, but her color-blindness seemed a little forced IMHO. Elly's bigger fear is that she might get chummy with BRIAN!! BTW, the reason I think he left his home to live in a foreign culture was not the 'stick with his blah-blah', but to get away from hypocrites like Elly. Granted, your average citizen of Tokyo might not say anything DIRECTLY, but if you aren't welcome, you KNOW it. Then, we got Lawrence. Sure, he SEEMS like a sympathetic gay character, but when you remember his father is a Latino you soon figure out he's ACTUALLY a warning against 'sullying the blood.' We got April's friend black friend Eva, who dates another black gut. Finally, we got Paul Wright: a modern day version of the old 'half-breed' from the Mountie Movies. She claims to be tolerant of diversity, but through her insincere spouting of slogans, we reveal a narrow-minded reactionary who probably mourns the end of segregation.


	28. February 10,2007

  
Not only does our author have unaddressed rage issues and a twisted love with the more worthless values of her upbringing, she seems to have definite trouble with reality. Her handling of the Noble Scribe's literary career is the most obvious expression of her smug un-realism. First, we have him, at the august old age of 30, as SENIOR editor for a national magazine.What's more, not only has he held this important job for three years, he's also turning in the odd free-lance piece AND about to become the author of a best-seller. All of this is perfectly credible in Foobland but, sadly, not in the _real world_ normal human beings live in. He'd still be a staff writer or at most junior editor. The only way any major publishing company would put a member of the Diaper Patrol like Mikerobe at the helm of ANYTHING is if they were to going to end publication and needed a fall guy. Anyway, did he EARN the job in the first place? Heck, no! He just happened to be standing around in the building after a corporate witch-hunt. The owners just went up to the first schmuck they saw and handed him a fat contract, which doesn't happen in the real world. Let's also examine his riveting expose of the illiterate cartoon trolls who live downstairs from him. He certainly didn't think they'd mind because he didn't think (since they were crouching bumpkins) they'd know. He and Lynn saw it as a misunderstood comic triumph. They don't understand people when they refer to this fluffy piece of whimsy as a callous and arrogant act of mischief. They also thought the <strike>victims</strike>philistines downstairs were awfully poor sports. The ingrates should have been thrilled they were being <strike>cruelly mocked by a smug, narcissistic cretin</strike> immortalized in print by a delicate genius. As for his piece of crap novel, the only plausible reason the publishing company would have for giving him that unfeasibly large check is if the school boards of English-speaking North America rose up en masse and demanded a **new** God-awful, turgid, vomit-inducing horror to antagonize high-school English classes. His home-life is equally incredible, because with two paychecks and all the cash he's raking in for his freelance idiocy, they still can't afford decent accommodations. I guess he's too refined to bother budgeting his money properly and as for Dedoormat, pull her string and she'll say 'Math is Hard.' He ain't the only Foob whose day-to-day existence is hippo-eats-dwarf impossible. The only way his sister Elizabeth's life is credible is if she's very, very vain and very, very stupid. In fact, all the major players live lives that clash horribly with what you and I call reality. Not only do we have a family that's totally off the wall, they're complete jerks too. Lynn makes a big noise about these ghouls being solid, respectable citizens and pillars of the community when, in fact, we have a squalid collection of no-accounts, bullies and twits. I'd be inclined to absolve her if she were being ironic and actually saying 'Get a load of _these_ shitheads' but every interview **I've** every seen indicates she actually sees them as the clean-cut role models she says they are.


	29. February 11,2007

  
The thing that strikes me most about the happy land of Foobonia is that there are no hidden meanings in anything they say or do. Every possible statement they make means EXACTLY what they mean without any tricky or annoying nuances. In the real world, of course, they'd constantly have to be reminded that someone they thought was paying them a compliment wasn't. That's because the madwoman at the helm, like a lot of superficial people, doesn't like irony. In her mind, making a statement to suggest its opposite is inherently bad. Human communication should consist of people baldly stating the points that concern them without stooping to muddy the waters by being 'insincere.' This explains why the humor in this strip is so bloody forced. We have a woman who refuses to understand irony and sarcasm trying to fake it. The reason she doesn't get or like irony is that she's fairly shallow and refuses to look too closely into other's minds. Her lack of self-awareness makes her claim to be an accurate observer of the human condition all the more ludicrous.


	30. February 12,2007

Now, you know and I know that Michael is an insufferable and juvenile nitwit, bullying lout of an older brother, neglectful son (not to mention GRANDson [He don'wanna catch old people germs.]) , [boxcar]-poor husband, remote father and sniveling dolt, moaning piteously about having to suffer the least inconvenience. Why did Elly not nip his tendencies towards meatballism in the bud, you ask? Simple. She secretly wants him to be a goofola. She likes his blind, hateful arrogance and worships his varletry. WHY in God's name does she do that? 'Cause even someone as clueless as Elly can see that he'll always be racing around bouncing from a series of self-induced crises and need a sympathetic ear: HER ear. Her idiot vanity will not allow her to let Mikerobe GROW UP, because that means he'll GROW AWAY from her. This also explains her delight that her daughter is incapable of defining herself as an autonomous human being, seemingly condemned to become a Stepford wife to a clammy invertebrate. She never bothered or had the intention to plumb the depths of the soul of one Eleanor Patterson (née Richards) in her fifty-five years on this planet, preferring to define herself as wife and mother. This is why she dismissed her parents' disappointment with her dropping out of Uni when she and John got hitched as annoying and irrelevant. She doesn't care how hard they had to work or they money they invested to get her an education; she only went there to meet Mr. Right. Her over-identification with media imagery and peer pressure convinced her that she had to settle down and raise a family, despite her manifest failure as wife and mother. Her only real success in her preferred sphere is that of cook and chamber-maid. This also explains their inability to tidy up after themselves: like a lot of woman her age I've met, she gets awfully territorial about her housework.


	31. February 15,2007

For someone who makes a living using the language, our author has a rather shaky grasp of colloquial English. I'm not talking about clunky imbecile John's ludicrously pedestrian attempt at sounding cool. I'm talking about her attempt at providing dialogue for April and her contemporaries. I'm also not really talking about 'foob' or 'prag' either, but I will get back to them. No, I'm talking about the terms used to discuss the hymen of one Rebecca Maguire and and its status. She got one thing right in this scenario. Teenaged children are capable of unlovely behavior towards someone they think they can safely abuse. There is also still a stigma attached to those who can't control their impulses, although not as strong as in Lynn's time. That's as may be. The irritating thing is that it took me the better part of a day to figure out April and the gang thought Becky had lost her virginity!! Unlike ACTUAL slang terms, none of the catch-phrases they used called to mind furtive fornication in a sedan. That's the secret of slang, Lynnie. It's not arbitrary noise specifically designed to annoy tetchy boomers. A slang expression must, MUST call to mind the thing, person or activity it refers to as well as seem to have emerged out of the ether. Take, for existence, the term 'wimp'. She doubtless looks at it as a portmanteau of 'whining simp' (thereby explaining 'Foob' [foolish boob]). She forgot or never knew of the radical surgery Bud Segar performed on the noun 'whimperer' to give Popeye's timid, deceitful, hamburger-loving comic foil a surname. The popularity of the comic strip 'Thimble Theater starring Popeye' meant that spineless cowards like J. Wellington Wimpy eventually became known as wimpy people, and thus WIMPS. The expression 'foob' may yet catch on, but it will only do so if people take to it and not if it's shoved down their throats. Her real answer to the proposition that young people don't talk like that is that they should.


End file.
